So many tools, so small a budget

Ever since the bursting of the dot-com bubble, organizations are generally very conservative with their IT budget. At the same time, the cost of maintaining existing applications has grown to over 50% of IT budget according to some reports. For US-based organizations, IT budgets are further stressed by the need to acquire applications and systems to satisfy regulatory compliance requirements.

Given the above, what should be the priority for products that manage the performance and availability of Web applications? I would say quite high since an effective Web APM product can:

• Liberate IT from its fire fighting mode with dramatic impact on productivity (read, do more for less);
• Increase customer satisfaction and therefore revenue potential from e-commerce applications;
• Increase the productivity of users of Web-enabled enterprise applications;
• Lower help-desk cost by lowering the number of complaints;
• Speed up the transition to Web-enablement making the business more agile;
• Reduce the stress on IT, help-desk, and development staff; and
• The list just goes on and on.

Let's just look at the potential reduction in cost relating to handling end-user complaints. Just multiply (i) the average number of complaints handled by the help desk and IT per month, by (ii) the average time need to resolve a complaint. Take the result and multiply that by (iii) the cost of the personnel involved. On top of that, one can also factor in (iv) the opportunity and hard cost from the line items listed above. It is not hard to see how the investment in the right Web APM tools can have a very high ROI.

I would argue that spending priority be placed on Web APM tools to assure the quality of service of existing (or future) Web applications. This should happen before spending money on new Web-enablement projects or bringing new businesses online. Not the other way around as most organizations tend to do. It makes sense to spend money on paving the road before spending money on a sports car to run on it. Why buy a Porsche if the road is bumpy and unpaved?